Give Me Liberty

This American chaos of released human energies has been going on for little more than a century, less than half of this country’s past history. In that time it has created America and made America the richest country in the world. Where has this wealth come from?

Americans have been exploiting the natural resources of half a continent. And this exploitation is continuing now and should resume its accelerating rate of speed, for our unused natural wealth is enormous. Electric power, for instance, has hardly begun to be exploited. Chemistry has barely discovered a new universe of natural resources. But natural resources alone do not explain our relatively greater wealth, for while Americans have been exploiting America, Europeans have been exploiting Asia, Africa, South America, the East Indies, the West Indies, Australia and the South Seas.

No such riches poured into American hands as Mexico and Peru gave Spain. There are mines in Burma, China, old Russia and Australia, as well as in Nevada. California’s gold did not equal South Africa’s gold and diamonds. There are coal and iron in Britain and in the Saar, almost inexhaustible oil in Persia, Mosul, Azerbijan and Venezuela. The great forests of the world are not in America. No soil on earth is as productive as Egypt and the Soudan. Coffee, rubber, sugar, rum, spices and copra and tin paid dividends. India returned some profit, and Indo-China has not been a loss to France, nor the East Indies to the Netherlands. I find it difficult to see that Americans have been exploiting more natural resources than Europeans have.

Free land will not explain our wealth. Wealth comes not from land, but from labor on the land, and subject populations toil perhaps even more industriously than free men. Incidentally, it is an error to suppose that land in this country cost nothing.

Big speculators grabbed this soil, on credit, and sold it for high prices. The fury of speculation in land warrants began before our government was created. The Continental Congress, in one deal, sold five million acres in Ohio. Virginia sold, in blocks of a thousand acres, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and no one knew how much of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. That speculating crashed in the 1790’s, with business failures and hard times.

After the Louisiana Purchase, when the wage for twelve hours’ hard work was twenty-five cents, the United States Land Office in one year sold five million acres of Missouri river-bottom land at an average price of five dollars an acre. Speculators got it, and prices jumped. Speculation went mad over town lots; promoters sold them for $50; they jumped to $250, $500, $800, $1,000. Farm land went to $50 an acre. The bottom dropped out in the bank-crash of 1819.

The Homestead Act was passed in 1862, when only the supposedly uninhabitable Great American Desert remained. Twenty-eight years later the last of the Great American Desert was seized in the last land-run. Two decades after that, I myself helped to sell the virgin land of California for prices ranging to $800 an acre.

Perhaps America is the richest country because Americans did seize so much territory and make it one country with no trade-barriers across it. Perhaps it is the richest country because Americans welcomed and exploited the industrial revolution, applied science and the machines, as no other people did. And perhaps they were able to do this because they were not hampered by frontiers, class distinctions and the weight of bureaucracies as Europeans have always been.

The fact that America is the richest country is not alone so important; England is rich, and so are France and the Netherlands; so was pre-war Germany, and the Austrian empire. It is more important that the United States of America is the country of the richest population in the world.

Logically, unrestrained selfishness should build up vast wealth of a few, and submerge the multitudes into more miserable poverty. The logical Germanic mind of Marx saw that. He saw and could statistically count a certain amount of wealth, tangible, solid as an apple. It followed naturally that the more of it was seized by the upper class, the less would be left for the lower classes. The rich would grow richer and the poor, poorer.

Actually, in this country, the opposite occurred. In enjoyment of wealth there is less disparity, now, today, between the richest American and the average American workingman than there was between Jefferson and Monticello and the average far western settler in Kentucky.

It appears that individualism tends to a leveling of wealth, to destroying economic inequality. Marx, the European, had no conception of the enormous creative energies released when multitudes of men, for the first time freed from economic control, set out each in his own way to get for himself the greatest possible amount of wealth. Certainly this brief experiment in individualism has not only created great wealth and an unimaginable multiplication of forms of wealth in goods and services, but it has also distributed these forms of wealth to an unprecedented and elsewhere unequalled degree. We express this by saying that America has the highest standard of living in the world.

This, too, seems to have happened by accident. We all know that it was not planned; no one intended it. Each of us has been out to get all he could for himself and his family, “upon the simple rule and good old plan that he shall take: who has the power, and he shall keep who can.”